Monday, 10 August 2015

"Bangistan" (Guardian 09/08/15)

Yes, Bollywood has
made a comedy about suicide bombers, and yes, it really does feature a man
singing and dancing while fitting a vest with explosives. Praise be, then, that
critic-turned-director Karan Anshuman approaches his task with smarts and
sensitivity. Anshuman knows he’s handling incendiary material; equally, he
grasps that fundamentalist freedom fighters appear to be fighting fundamental
freedoms, not least our right to sing, dance and laugh. His response updates
Chris Morris’s Four Lions via the
methods of last year’s Aamir Khan megahit P.K.:
working beneath a chador of broad comedy, he sneaks out sly, satirical points
about the ill-informed rage with which the world now burns.

The eponymous
backwater divides up along recognisable real-world lines – rocky North
Bangistan a Muslim stronghold, the more prosperous South home to Hindus – while
permitting no comparable separation of church and state: each faction is tied
to political parties for whom stirring up religious tensions (and fears their
land will be overrun) has become expedient. Anshuman’s overriding gag is that
these sides are so alike they should arrive at the same idea: to dispatch a
young supporter wearing the other side’s traditional garb to the World
Religious Conference in Krakow, in order to carry out an attack that will
discredit the enemy.

Though Muslim Hafeez
(Riteish Deshmukh) and Hindu Praveen (Pulkit Samrat) are established as
stooges, Anshuman demonstrates a serious understanding of the ways in which the
young come to be radicalised. For Hafeez, the mission is an escape from the
drudgery of a call centre chiselled into North Bangistan’s mountains (one of
several production coups here); for preening, privileged drama student Praveen,
it’s an opportunity to give the eye-catching performance he’s long dreamt of
giving – and here, we might see how fundamentalism can warp the revolutionary
urge in frustrated creatives, driving them away from acts of creation and
towards destruction.

Theidea of job-swapping rival terrorists,
obliging them to walk however many miles it is from Bangistan to Poland in one
another’s shoes, is a sharp one, and yields a very funny stretch as each tries
to improve the other’s religion from the inside. (Upon entering a cremation,
Hafeez suggests that a pyre would provide a more efficient burn.) Yet the premise
depends upon the leads becoming interchangeable, and soon enough they’ve become
that comic standby, two guys walking into a bar: neither sure whether, as
Muslim-passing-for-Hindu and Hindu-passing-for-Muslim, they should drink, both
realising they may be more alike than first taught.

Anshuman’s amused
doodling means there’s almost always something to chuckle at: Praveen’s beardy
welcoming committee, with their “Keep Calm, I’m Not a Terrorist” T-shirts, the
Polish potato farm that conceals a terrorist home shopping network, the North
Bangistan branch of “FcDonald’s” [sic],
with its figurehead stationed forlornly out front in Muslim clownface. Ram
Sampath and Puneet Krishna’s songs turn the usual lush strings and tabla beats
to atypically sardonic ends (sample lyrics: “I will smite the blots that they
are/And rule the world on my whim”), with disco-infused standout “Saturday Night” making a hi-NRG case for the bacchanalian benefits of co-existence.

Throughout, the
conception is shrewd enough to push Bangistan
into that sweet spot where silly meets sophisticated, and its cleverest touch
comes readymade for farce: a hole in the infrastructure of the boys’ dingy
lodgings, which allows each to peer directly into the other’s room. Via this
carefully managed device, an analogue to Bajrangi Bhaijaan’s torn-down fences, Anshuman can further propagate his own
message: that closer viewing banishes those misconceptions by which some would
divide us. It’s a modest proposal, but a heartening one – and its puerile gags may
just help Bangistan reach those
suggestible souls who most need to hear it.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).